Your morsels of value

What do I mean by network value? In a network, the popular nodes become even more popular, according to a “rich get richer” fashion known as “Preferential Attachment”. Previously I have used the example of the London Underground, although that is not a particularly good example in terms of dynamics, because the popular stations are interchanges. There is very little occasion for a new interchange to suddenly pop up at a station that hitherto was not an interchange. New stations don’t materialise that often, so the whole analogy proves a bit slow to visualise in action.

The network value of a vertex in a network, which is rewarded by affordability of opportunity to increase connections in a scale-free manner, is itself a complex parameter. What do I mean by value? Up to now, we’ve just been assuming we mean that we offer something, perhaps something unique or perhaps something appreciated or liked or funny or thoughtful or provoking or some other appealing lure. If a node in a network produces something no other node does, and if as coincidence would have it, other nodes in a network actually appreciate that product, then that’s what we’ve been imagining what I mean by “value” within a network. But this is quite subjective.

Lots of nodes, sorry, people, produce and present to the network more or less nothing. When they do, it might be of low importance such as mentioning that their cat rolled over. Or it might be something derived that they are simply passing on, like a retweet or a pasted-in motivational quote. Motivational quotes are a freely utilised currency. As far as I’m aware, Henry Ford, Bob Marley and Thomas Edison don’t actually have twitter or facebook accounts, what with the inconvenience of being dead and all that. Yet much of what they ever said in their lives is passed around freely. Not only as a way of cheering people up (or ‘motivating’ them), but packaging it as a kind of “you got that good feeling from me” emotional transaction.

As I say, a node that produces is not always offering value to the network. In a work environment, if someone farts, the value of their unique production is generally not appreciated or liked, nor does it give everyone else a good feeling. So you see, it’s subjective. What we consider value is often measured and quantified in terms of a qualitative effect on us. The more happy it makes us, the more value we assign to that direct contact on the network that packaged their output into tiny little morsels, nibble after nibble. We afford network fitness to them as a reward. But only if we calculate that they offer value to us, and this is purely in terms of how good it makes us feel at the time. It’s all very much instant gratification, there’s almost nothing long-term about this, and it doesn’t correlate with any true usefulness of the information, just how sweet it tastes to us.

Is Planet Earth skint?

Is Planet Earth broke? Has the world run out of money? Are we financially so overdrawn that life on Earth cannot continue because it is skint? Is this how it all ends? Not with a bang, nor a whimper, but a knock? Consider the concept of money. What is it? When was the last time you saw some? That’s probably why people have trouble defining what it is. Money is counterintuitive, it behaves as a fluid. It represents stored energy expenditure that is temporally decoupled. In other words, it’s a token of past or future stored effort that can be moved about in time and given to someone else in return for an equivalent amount of effort on their part.

Energy expenditure in the sense that we’re interested in is essentially analogous to work or effort. For the most part, to do work involves expending some energy. Yes, even bankers and estate agents. If I bake a loaf of bread, you could do the same. However, if I bake two loaves of bread and you catch two fish, I might accept a fish for a loaf, if we both agree. If you wanted today’s loaf but you didn’t manage to catch the fish today I might let you have a loaf and you owe me a fish, if I trust you. If you’re a stranger, forget it. Same as if I burned the loaves today I could still get a fish and owe an extra loaf tomorrow, if I were known and trusted. If we had some kind of agreed token instead, we could dispense with the direct barter and I get a coin for a loaf, I give a coin for a fish, and a stranger with no loaves or fish gives a coin even though we don’t trust her. It represents the effort involved in catching a fish or baking a loaf, or some equivalent effort that we’ve all agreed on. Or we could store the money for later when we might need more of it, like to buy a small twin-engine personal jet plane. Work, or effort, therefore is associated with expenditure of energy.

Think of the work you’ve done today, or this week, or last month. It’s easy to see that working self-employed seems like a linear relationship — do a lot of work and get paid for it. Put half the effort in and not get paid as much. Put no effort in at all and get nothing. But as we all know it’s not that straightforward. In a job as an employee, it’s easy to see people putting more effort in than yourself, and people putting less effort in than yourself, yet all getting paid similar amounts at similar times. It’s easy to see that the ‘free-rider’ effect limits the amount of work in a team or group to a socially normal expectation. Even though some people coast along going through the motions of holding a job down and yet getting paid, while others excel, and yet get paid, we all actually do some amount of work. Hardly anybody gets away with doing nothing. We all work, we all expend effort, and we all therefore qualify to make money.

I said that the fluid “money” is a temporally decoupled token of stored effort. This is the essential mechanism behind trade and transactions in the modern world. Fiat money is the use of something otherwise totally useless, as the thing that money is made of. We use coins, which are not much use to eat or sleep on or anything else other than buying something else with. Similarly with paper money, which I suppose you could burn if you want to keep warm. The KLF must’ve been getting pretty cold prior to that day in 1994. Money these days as we know is simply a number in a bank database, not even backed up by a Gold Standard, and this is still a fiat currency. Even with forthcoming popularity of cryptocurrencies, the most popular of which is currently Bitcoin, we still store or exchange effort in something that is otherwise totally useless in itself.

The world has a lot of people in it. Many of those people spend their day at work in a job. Many of those in jobs actually seem to do some real work — they can’t possibly spend all morning looking at Facebook. What would they do in the afternoon? We have a lot more people in circulation in the world now than we did before this recent recession. The one that frightened everyone since 2007 to about last year when Daft Punk ended it by releasing “Get Lucky” followed by Pharrell sealing global financial recovery with “Happy”. We all perform work, put in effort, and this gets stored for later or passed around as money. We have more productive capacity now than the world has ever had.

We should not and must not persist in this dismal attitude toward economics that allows falling down into austerity measures just to tighten up and restrict production. We must realise that the planet is not broke. Where did all the money go? Where was it to begin with? Is Planet Earth skint? Broke? Bankrupt? Of course not. Planet Earth should not hang up the sign saying “out of business”. We are not a broke planet. We have the work, the effort, the temporally decoupled system of representing transferrable stored energy — the money. It’s somewhere, it can’t have escaped. And if it turns out that we didn’t have as much fiat nonsense as we thought we did, we can easily make a lot more. Let’s get to work!

What is a network? Direction jobs letters

Previously I discussed networks and the notion that we use the word “network” all the time. We don’t fully appreciate all that the word connotes, so that what one person thinks of when you say “network” is quite different to another person’s thought.

I mentioned Euler’s solution to a famous “seven bridges problem”, what would become graph theory, with vertexes and edges. The London Tube map is a diagram of nodes and connections. Some stations are highly connected, acting as hubs between many tube lines, some not as many interchanges, but most are connected to only their previous and next station. Bank; Waterloo; Kings Cross; Hammersmith come to mind. If you change lines on your journey, stations like those look like good interchange opportunities and become quite busy — everyone uses them at once. This usually means that more people choose to use them, demonstrating the “rich get richer” behaviour of many networks, called Preferential Attachment. Highly connected vertexes become even more popular because they are highly connected.

I mentioned Six degrees of Separation, that having a close group of people has disadvantages. A homogenous group of people all interested in the same thing for the same reasons are prone to solving the same problems the same way, making the same mistakes, and processing new information with little variance. They spread ‘interesting’ relevant news rapidly with the effect that everyone in the group soon knows what everyone else in the group knows. This might sound nice and cosy and cohesive, but wait. What if one of the group leaves their job?

Some connections between nodes, in other words, some edges between vertexes, are asymmetrical. In other words, they only go one way, and don’t go back. In effect, they are arrows that only point one way. There may be a way back, via a different edge. Or there may not.  In such cases, the network becomes a directed network. The food chain is a directed graph, wolves and rabbits are connected. A wolf often eats a rabbit but a rabbit never eats a wolf. A rabbit eats lettuce but lettuce never eats a rabbit. Think of your own personal social networks. Chances are many connections have directed behaviour too. When job hunting, it feels different asking for a reference from your boss than a friend or coworker, the result may be different too. The directed network has an effect on the shape of the network and the timing and flow of information into it and out of it (if any flows out).

It wouldn’t be a surprise to say that a lot of people got their job not because of a cold application in response to a job ad, but because they knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone. When faced with job-hunting again, people will often reach out to those in their immediate networks for any information that might help (as if they were withholding info until just now). People in our own networks know and share the same information and are interested in the same kind of thing, noticing the same kind of opportunities as each other. Widening the range of contacts to people in the network much further away in terms of degrees of connection may actually give better results.

Those distant connections are exposed to other networks that your colleagues might not be, carrying other news not available within your immediate network. Mark Granovetter wrote in 1973 on the “strength of weak ties”. You may find a certain type of person at the periphery of networks, not afraid to cross over into other departments or groups of disciplines. The type of person not willing to pigeonhole themselves and interested in many and various endeavours in life, with contacts across them all. This can be of value — the chance to import knowledge or methods from distant departments. This type of person incidentally is often a catalyst where disruptive innovation can occur, crossing techniques and methods from one discipline they’re exposed to, to another. Even within our own organisations, departments elsewhere in the same company have different and valuable knowledge. If only they were connected. This is the notion of social capital.

In 1967, Stanley Milgram carried out an experiment forwarding letters to strangers to gain more information on the “small worlds property” of some networks. Even at that recent point, debate arose over how many degrees of separation existed in typical real-world networks that we are all familiar with. Exactly how connected was our world? Would two random people in a population know each other? Directly? Through an acquaintance? Through more links than that? The experiment at Harvard was designed to find the average path length between two nodes in the network, in this case, nodes being people. Random people in chosen cities in America were sent a letter to forward to someone in particular, if they knew them, and if they didn’t know them, to send it to someone else they imagined might know the intended recipient. There’s a lot more to the experiment than that, of course, the package introduced the experiment and had postage paid replies to invite participation; tracking postcards back to Harvard, etc, but essentially that’s what the experiment did.

The results were quite interesting and somewhat revealing. In one part of the experiment, 160 letters went out and 24 hit the target, sent to his home address, but 16 of those 24 all came through the same person, a clothing merchant identified as “Mr Jacobs”. Others of the letters came to the target through his office, and over half of these came directly through two other men. Why so many coming in through so few? Are these people acting like the busy stations on the London Underground? Are those men each playing the part of a kind of social hub? This is quite possible. Some people are highly connected, and their highly connected nature increases their connectivity as people favour connecting to the already highly connected — again, Preferential Attachment (the “rich get richer” mechanism), except we’re not necessarily talking about financial riches, but richness of social capital in their social networks.

What is a network? Connections mornings graphs

A short while ago I posed a fairly straightforward question — “What is a network?” — except it’s not straightforward at all. It’s an overloaded word — a word that does multiple duties according to the context.

Except that the contexts these days are so wide as to overlap a lot of the time, hence the clarity and focus of the meaning is diffused. Everybody knows what we mean by ‘network’ — but not many people have a clear and precise definition. It’s one of those words which we see and nod and say to ourselves “yep, networking – I know what that is”. I usually find that if a person can’t clearly explain something to someone else (let’s say, to a Martian that’s just landed) then that person probably doesn’t actually know it at all — they merely think they do.

In the case of networks this is of course an easy illusion — we’re all on the Internet, we know that’s a network, we therefore know what a network is. Those in jobs might have a desk with computer on with a Cat5 cable coming out the back of it and off into a mysterious hole in the skirting board. Equally mysterious people come round to fix your network and tell you why stuff can’t be installed on the computer.

Even before the Internet people have been saying that business is all about ‘networking’. Okay, I’ll bring the Cat5 cable. Oh, not that sort of networking. What then? I need to ‘hook up’ with other people face to face, to “network” with them. Much time was spent in uncomfortable rooms in offices, trying to be well-behaved and impressive to strangers, forcing the act of ‘networking’ to happen so you could say you’ve ‘networked’. Even more time was spent in restaurants and rather comfortable pubs, also apparently ‘networking’.

Networking in the business context is simply turning up face to face where there are others that have also turned up? Networking is simply turning up? Is that the driver behind that manic willy-waving contest of arranging networking meetings to compel one to turn up even earlier than sanely comfortable and pretending that it’s normal and that we’re not only awake but somehow productive as a result?

Networks are very interesting in ways which most of us are not thinking of when we think of networking. For example, in 1736, Leonard Euler drew an interesting diagram, of bridges. I won’t go into it here, that link explains the background. The resulting diagram forms a chart or “graph”, which has blobby nodes and connecting arrows on. The node we would come to call a “vertex”, the arrow would become known as an “edge”, so graph theory is all about edges and vertexes (okay, “vertices” if we have time to be grammatically correct).  If a vertex has more than one edge touching it — in other words, if a node has more than one arrow connecting to it — then we refer to that number as the number of “degrees” that node has.

That’s where the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation” comes from, by the way. The exact number of six is not necessarily true – it depends on the particular population, not the whole world in one go. But it’s kind of true enough to give us the understanding of social connectivity we see in Twitter, Linked-in etc. You might be connected to me. I might be connected to a bunch of other people. Each of those may in turn be connected to other groups of people. Someone in one of those groups might also be connected to me somehow. It happens. These first-degree, second-degree and even third-degree connections are quite close to us.

One of the problems with having a tight, regular and uniform networking group, especially all first and second degree connections, is that news spreads rapidly and if anything happens, everyone in the immediate degrees of your group get to know about it all pretty quickly. This might seem good, but the downside of everyone knowing what everyone else knows is that there’s less opportunity for variation. There’s less likelihood of individual thinking in solutions, and less actual opportunity availability— less than you’d think. I’ll explain this in a later post.

However, not many people would dispute that if you want success, you’re not going to find it by yourself. You’ve got to get out and get with other people. Success does not open your door and walk into your living room, getting in the way of the television as it passes in front. You get out and go to it. That’s why we all prize the idea of networking, because of the perceived value it can offer. I just wish more people knew in detail what they mean by networking when they talk about it. It’s far from intuitive.

How do new ideas happen?

Have you ever had a new idea? Happens all the time? Used to happen more? Been happening more lately? What do you do with new ideas? Do you remember them? Forget them? Do you think you’ll remember them and then end up forgetting them? Do you write them down in a notepad or something like that, or on your phone or tablet?

Idea management is a complex process, and it doesn’t come easily. With a little discipline and attention the ideas can be captured during the brief period that they’re resting on your shoulder, before they fly off again to be forgotten forever.

But what about the nature and mechanism of innovation itself? How does innovation occur in the first place? The structure of innovation is rarely neat and tidy, and rarely in whole units of what one might consider to be an innovation. Anything new that has been thought of has almost certainly not been thought of in one entire chunk of innovating. Starting from a clean slate and ending up with a fully formed idea ready to implement. Oh no, not like that. Maybe in fiction, but it certainly doesn’t happen like that in reality anyway.

In most cases, a person coming up with what others might classify as an innovation have been exposed to the problem space for some time. Working in the world of that particular problem. Struggling with defining what the problem is, how big it is, what it is, what it isn’t, what it should be or could be or must be. The problem’s territory or world is what I might term the problem space, in which the innovator resides, often for some time, and the solution is the eventual target. In other words, things rarely happen overnight. They might seem like it from the outside, but to the person innovating, they’ve probably been within the problem space for years, even before they realised that there’s even a problem to solve.

The other interesting structural characteristic of innovation is that, again, it doesn’t occur as a whole unit, it almost always consists of mostly stuff that you already knew, or stuff you already have, or stuff that is already in place. The moment of inspiration isn’t to have the entire idea from scratch, the moment of inspiration is more usually to suddenly realise that what you already have, already know and already did can fit together in a way that you simply hadn’t seen before. A new arrangement. An arrangement that allows an advantage or solves a problem or enables something further to happen. You look around, there’s nothing magically novel that wasn’t there a minute ago, except yes there is - a new configuration, a new way of putting it together, a new way of utilising or processing or perceiving it all. You had what was necessary all along.

In fact, it’s even more surprising than that. Not only did the innovation spend a long while cooking in the problem space before it surfaces, and not only did the innovation consist of a new way of looking at what you already have, but in most cases, the solution that’s staring you in the face isn’t even a new one. Chances are, you’ve even had this idea before. Several times over, in fact. You had it, forgot it, later you had it again under a new configuration, forgot it again, and so on. Finally, it persists and at the moment of insight you suddenly see it for the value it really offers. (This time you write it down). That’s insight. It’s called insight because it points in. A sight that points inward. Inward at what you already know, already have and already do. The realisation of a sudden clarity in sight. Yet, you had it all along!

Sequence is important

The order in which we do things is very important. Initial conditions are important. What happens next is important. I’m not any kind of cook, but I imagine that cooking is probably like this too — you can’t just empty all the ingredients at once into a receptacle and cook it and end up with a three course dinner. Or maybe you can, I’ve no idea. I doubt there’s really an endeavour in life in which it doesn’t matter at all in which order you do things. Not important activities, anyway. Even making a cup of tea is a religious matter — milk in first or last?*

Let me ask you a question. What comes next:
1 2 3

If you answered 4, that’s a perfectly logical response, but if you answered 5, you’re also correct.

How is 5 the next in the sequence? Well, we might be just beginning a Fibonacci sequence. Let me present it in a more correct way:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 and so on.

Let’s say you have the first number — 0.
Let’s say you put in a second number — 1.
These two numbers represent our initial condition.

Now, take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. And so on. This is the process we will apply.

Well, life’s a lot like this. We have initial conditions, and we have processes.

The initial conditions may be the way we’re born, for example. We’re born into certain families with certain belief systems and certain attitudes to wealth (or more usually, a lack of it), and certain ways of looking at the world, wherever in the world we’ve had the luck to be born. Or, you could think of initial conditions as where you are now. What you’ve got now. What you start with if you were to start now. If you’re about to embark on a big change in your life from now on, you have to take it from where you are now, who you are now and what you’ve got now. Those are your initial conditions.

The processes we might also call strategies. A strategy is simply a predictable repeatable already-defined approach to doing things, applied no matter what. Occasionally we find the strategy doesn’t work effectively so we have to do something on the spot, something exceptional, some made up fix, instead of following the plan, just enough to get us back to the strategy. We call these tactics.

A tactical approach deals with cases as they occur, each in a specific way.

A strategic approach deals with everything according to a defined process.

With the Fibonacci sequence, the strategy is simple, as I said above, “take the two most recent numbers, add them and this is your next number” and then do it again and keep doing it. No matter what the last two numbers on the stack are. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care. As long as there’s two numbers on the top of the stack, we’ll take them, add them, push the result onto the top of the stack, and then do the whole operation again and again. That’s the strategy. That’s the process. That’s the thing we do in life. If you have a specific approach to life, if you respond to things that happen in a characteristic way (you know, according to your character), if you have your way of doing things, then you have a strategy and you’ll do it no matter what, to whatever happens. Doesn’t matter, don’t care, just do the strategy as usual, it got us this far so it must be the correct thing to do.

If you change the strategy to a different strategy, let’s say, “take the two most recent numbers, divide the newer one by the older one and chuck away the remainder, and this is your next number” and you run this strategy over and over, you will get a totally different result. You’ll end up at a different destination, even from the same beginnings.

As I say, life’s a lot like this. There are people with comfortable beginnings, and people with tough beginnings. There are people who have a certain strategy to what happens in life, and there are other people who have a different strategy to what happens. Some people seem to have no strategy, treating everything as it comes on a tactical basis but in reality, this is some kind of strategy in itself (not a particularly strong one, though). Change one part of the initial state of the fibonacci sequence and apply the same process and you get a different result — try this:

Instead of 

0 1 1 2 etc

run it beginning

3 1 etc

see what you get. Same process, different initial conditions. Totally different destination in life. Busy millionaire instead of daytime telly on the sofa. Unfortunately, we can’t very well do much about who we are, the family we’re born into, the country, the economy, the educational opportunities planned from birth, etc. We can’t even do much about where we are today, retrospectively — we can’t go back to yesterday and make a change. We take it from where we are now. What we can change, though, is the process in our lives. The strategy. We can re-strategise any time we like, and if we like the results, stick to it as though it’s a proper strategy and we meant to do it like that all along. The strategy we live by is a specific sequence. Put the milk in first, every time, or put the milk in last, every time? Or put the milk in first if it’s a teapot and last if it’s a teabag in a mug. It’s a sequence, it’s a process, it’s a strategy.

* The answer is last, if you’re using a teabag, first if you’re using a poncy teapot — the teabag requires tea to brew at pretty much boiling point. If you let cold milk cool the hot water before it has a chance to perform the action you just end up with tea-coloured hot water instead of a proper cuppa. However, if you think you live in the Edwardian era and use a teapot, then the brewing occurs in the teapot, unhindered by the cooling effects of cold milk, and therefore the tea can be poured into cups that already have a bit of milk. This would have been a necessity in the olde times as the bone china in those days was quite prone to fracturing with contact with boiling hot water, and the milk in the cup helps avoid this outcome. As you see, the initial conditions followed by the sequence of the process consequently applied is important. Especially with tea, which is of course of utmost importance.

Trim the fat

How much stuff have you ever bought, and simply stored in a cupboard or attic (whatever a cupboard is — a board for cups?). How many of us have an attic full of crap of various grades, from ‘it’ll come in useful’ to ‘I don’t want to chuck it away but it’s in the way down here’, to ‘I was saving this to give to someone’ and even for the technophiles among us, the “magic attic” phenomena, related to the “magic drawer” which is the place where stuff that doesn't work gets put and a year or so later it comes out and magically works again, or usually not.

Okay, forget about attics, a lot of people don’t actually have an attic and have to leave stuff cluttered around the living area in drawers, shelves and corners. What about closer to home a bit, what about your phone? Or your tablet. What about the amount of apps we download through the play store or App Store because it was free or seemed useful or was cool a the time. How many apps have you got on your phone or tablet that you never use, have never opened, and can’t even remember what it does? Apps that you daren’t even open in case you actually do find out what it does. Apps with a clever but meaningless name, and a cute but meaningless icon. Apps that you thought were going to enhance your life but just got stashed away in case it might be useful in the future, or suchlike. How much stuff have we got like that our lives?

Recently I went on a cull on my iPad to get rid of the apps I don’t ever use, have forgotten what it did, or can’t figure out what it does from the icon or name. If I never used it, will I miss it? Of course not. Out it goes. This is a traumatic enough thing to apply to our phones and tablets. Maybe we should be brave and apply it to our attics, cupboards, corners and rooms. Trim the fat.

For now, though, maybe I should get rid of what isn't immediately useful. For example, in my fridge I have a rare roll of Kodak infrared 135 E6 film. My film scanner is broken (it’s in the magic attic) and I haven't shot film on my cameras in over a year, and will never, pretty much guaranteed, ever process E6 film again. Why do I keep this several-year-old expired but “valuable” roll of infrared film in the fridge? In case it comes in useful! We'll, so far it hasn't —maybe I should go on the evidence and chuck it out.

At the moment I’m on a well earned break from my business start ups, enjoying the weather down in Cornwall for a few days, maybe when I get back to London the first thing I’ll do is to throw out that symbolic roll of E6 infrared film and feel the relief.

Is feedback useful in business and real life?

We need feedback, they say. Not when you’re on the radio, of course, the delay through the transmission process will cause your own voice to return later and echo through the same process. Not when you’re singing on stage, either, as you’ll get a high pitched tone as the mic and amplifier picks up its own signal from the speakers, causing a positive feedback loop. That’s no good. But all other times, feedback is what we want. Is that right? We want feedback?

If the bad kind, on stage, in broadcasting, is bad because it is positive feedback, then what is negative feedback? That’s all over the place too — technology is full of negative feedback systems, for correcting deviations, etc. Aircraft navigation and flight controls use negative feedback to ascertain how far off course we are, how far out of the desired steering the plane is, etc. At home, the central heating has a thermostat which uses negative feedback — is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? Yes, then stop doing what it’s doing — stop heating. Most systems we use all day use negative feedback for correction and control, it’s an essential part of modern system design, from cybernetics to signal theory (see Claude Shannon’s work, if you’re interested in that sort of thing).

What about us? In business, in real life? Do we need feedback? Which sort? Are we cybernetic systems, designed to operate through error correction via a negative feedback loop? I would suggest it’s not that simple. Yes, we operate mechanistically in many ways, but not totally. We are subject to the mass reinforcements of feedback that amplify, exaggerate and ramp up the input to increase the output that are all typical of an out-of-control positive feedback loop. When we’re told of news of a bank that’s perhaps on shaky ground and there’s a slight risk that in the distant future it may fail, we all queue up at the doors to get our money out, and guess what, the bank fails. It’s that horrid positive feedback again, isn’t it.

What about negative feedback. Our lives are full of that. You need not look any further than our partners or spouses to find a constant and reliable source of negative feedback. Corrective criticism designed to adjust what we’re doing can obviously improve the outcome. Anyone involved in quality control in mass production knows this — if there’s an issue or fault, detecting it, measuring it, and bringing this evidence to the source of the error as negative feedback will hopefully adjust and correct the error, so that subsequent production is within tolerance. That’s pretty normal for modern production in most industries.

However, although the negative feedback loop indubitably works so well for keeping systems under tight control, is it the way humans work? To a certain level, yes of course. If you’re learning something, or training someone, highlighting errors or incorrect actions will hopefully cause subsequent attempts to occur within acceptable boundaries. Learning a musical instrument, a language, a sport, etc. You want to know what you’re doing wrong, and in quite significant detail, otherwise you’ll continue doing it, perhaps never knowing why things aren’t turning out quite right.

However, as hinted at in reference to partners, there’s a tendency to think that if negative feedback achieves so much good, then just keep doing it, and doing it more! Not just partners, but work colleagues, everyone we are in contact with in fact. Of course, that falls into the category of positive feedback and escalates to a level of saturation representing the most that we can put up with. Occasionally, though, that top level is reached and broken, so people split up, people walk out of jobs, people shout at customer service workers, people even go out on strike and have marches.

What about positive feedback as the antidote? If used carefully, it can be a good thing, it can be a reinforcement, an encouragement, and an ingredient for growth. As referred to earlier, 100% positive feedback is no use. Telling someone they’re fantastic all the time when they’re not is really unproductive and can be damaging, but never telling people they’re doing okay when they’re doing okay is also unhealthy. You can achieve a lot with negative feedback but you can’t go all the way with just nothing but criticism, and similarly you can have quite damaged outcomes with nothing but positive feedback but used now and then it’s quite a good ingredient.

What about no feedback at all? Well, there I think is the biggest problem. People working alone or at home or teleworking or setting up new businesses on their own, are at risk of having absolutely no feedback at all. Most feedback you’ll get from the Internet is simply non-existent — no feedback at all — you’ll be totally ignored. You don’t exist. Your efforts add up to nothing.

The next level of feedback is simply a simple “+” or a “like”, which might well only indicate that the person reading it didn’t disagree with it and wants some way of remembering it later, on that fictitious day that they’ll come back to everything they’ve ever bookmarked and read some of it again (I don’t know, maybe the Internet firehose dried up that day, nobody posted new stuff, so we all have to read some old stuff). The Internet is a strange and unintuitive system when it comes to feedback design principles. There’s a lot of positive feedback tendencies about it — things can ramp up out of control very quickly, “going viral” as they say (in reality it’s more like a stampede than a virulent outbreak) and then it’s old news, buried forever like Crazy Frog or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. There’s no shortage of negative feedback on the Internet either — you don’t have to look far to find maximum criticism occurring any day of the week.

But the risk of working on your own is that there’s absolutely no feedback at all — your efforts might be good, or might need adjustment, but the particular response curves of the system are simply not linear (technically, there’s hysteresis, which is partly the reason things can go viral) and this lag or disconnection can be disconcerting, depressing and give the impression that you’re being completely ignored.

We need feedback — to tell if we’re on the correct path or not. Without feedback we might think we’re doing okay but we’re really heading off in an incorrect direction. Or worse, without feedback we don’t get any validation that what we’re doing amounts to anything worthwhile at all, so we stop wasting our time on it and do something else instead, or at least, slow down, in case it turns out to be a waste of time.

If you’re doing your own thing, if you’re working alone, if you’re not part of a group, then there’s an additional resource drain of having to have faith that what you’re doing might one day add up to something. Even when in the face of things, there’s nothing complete right here and right now, and the whole world is ignoring you, giving no feedback at all — neither positive nor negative — just nothing. It’s under those circumstances that we must remember what we’re doing and fix our sights on the eventual outcome — the goal, the destination, the thing we’re doing it all for. We have to be our own feedback loop.

How old are you? No, not you, but you. Everything you know is wrong pt 1

How old are you? Since the clock was punched the moment you popped out, that age clock has been ticking away. Seasons, years, winters, summers, holidays in the sun, holidays in the rain, christmases in the grey, school days all fabricated and fictitious, work days one after the other we’d rather forget. How old are you, then?

Well, you yourself might be that certain age on the tip of your tongue (or if you get to a certain point, you have to think to yourself whether that was actually plus or minus a decade, I forget). But many of us have encountered that urban legend floating around our infosphere that states that as our cells are under a process of constant renewal, our bodies are no more than about seven years old.

This is a nice thought. Wrong, but nice. Like most things you thought you knew, this is of course nothing more than consumer-grade bullshit. Nobody questions it, because nobody wants to. It’s a nice cosy thought to think that we’re fresh and young and anything wrong will repair itself in a few years, hence, the myth is kept alive because we want it. Well, there’s nothing wrong with a little utilitarian bullshit applied here and there — there’s obvious value in it, in this instance. It makes you feel better — warm, cosy, radiant, healthier, and to continue the stream of denial, makes you able to face situations you might not otherwise feel up to. After all, you’re almost brand new. That’s valuable — a delusion that’s of value — nothing wrong with that. Except that it’s wrong, of course, but a lot of things are wrong. So what, it feels good.

Scientifically, we do age, cells do get replaced, but to say that we’re a whole new person every seven years or so is false. Some cells are replaced entirely, within weeks. In the stomach, for example. Other cells are replaced almost not at all, in the eye, for example. Our brain is a network of cells forming neurons, most of those once dead are not going to make a return. We are born with more brain cells than we will have for the rest of our lives. On average, yes you might be able to say, ‘a mean of something like every seven years’, but it’s a fairly useless average, if the range is so wide.

It is more useful to think that the brain itself, although constantly dying, is forming new information connections out of what remains. It is forming new levels of information from the incoming information, in the form of understanding. However, sometimes those things we thought we understand turn out to be not the case, and we have to change our mind about some things. This is kind of like what we thought was appealing about the body renewing itself ever few years or so. Except this time it’s true. If you accept the stance that everything you know is probably wrong (and we’ve all been there) then it’s a nice notion that what we knew that turns out to be wrong is, if we wait a short while, going to be replaced by a new idea that’s closer to being correct.

What about our attitudes and responses? The same thing applies. You might have had a response that has been reiterated over the years, for example, the way you respond to your partner in an argument. Who knows, it might turn out that the way you were responding was actually wrong all along. That can be replaced with another new fresh response, probably a bit better and more recent, new and advanced than the old one, which, as we realise, was wrong.

Ian Tindale’s ‘Success in Seven Parts’ on Amazon. ASIN: B00LJJCLIA

This is the youtube promo for my book ‘Success in Seven Parts’ on Amazon. ASIN: B00LJJCLIA

Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon UK
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon ’Straya
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon India
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon US

…and the other Amazons too.

What do you read Kindle books on? I myself don’t own a Kindle. I read Kindle books on the official Kindle app on my iPad, on my Android tablet and phone, and when I had a Nokia 920 for a while, the Windows Phone Kindle app. Does anyone read Kindle books on their Mac or Pc? Laptop? Desktop? It’d be interesting to know if anyone does. I merely assume all Kindle consumption occurs on tablets, phones or actual Kindles, but all mobile devices. Post a reply if you do it on a laptop or desktop, let me know.

Who do you listen to?

Your environmental mix can govern your state of mind to a significant level. For example, if you habitually place yourself within groups of people who have a tendency to negatively criticise every new portion of their life experience, this will normalise as “expected behaviour” and soon you will start to do that too, because it is expected and indeed, valued. But is there really value in it? Yes, in some cases there is. The competitive approach to refinement in product development will benefit considerably from negative feedback. This is obvious to most of us.

But how about “real life” — the bit we’re supposed to live, casually, carelessly and enjoyably? Is there room for negative feedback and criticism there? I would say no. I would be wrong, if I let you think that that answer means that there should be a 100% lack of criticism and negative feedback, but rather, I would promote the notion that criticism is certainly not of value in our “normal” life as we think it is, and in its place, we should nurture a tendency to accept things the way they are without immediately and thoughtlessly striving to modify it or “improve” it.

For most of the time, we aren’t really criticising to improve for the betterment of what it actually is or could be, but rather, the position it places us in and the impression that we give to our fellow people as someone who feels it their duty to criticise. Increasingly, that person cannot accept the “what is”, the “now” and the “reality” without substituting it with a fictional future other version of reality every single time.


Success In Seven Parts pilot on youtube — spread it around!

Success In Seven Parts — the blog

This is the launch post of the “Success In Seven Parts” blog. It accompanies my “Success In Seven Parts” series of motivational speaking talks. Are you interested in the process of achievement? The “Success In Seven Parts” pilot is up on youtube now: